UN Tally Excluded Most Afghan Civilian Deaths in Night Raids

WASHINGTON/KABUL — A July United Nations report asserting that only 30 civilians
died in targeted raids in Afghanistan during the first six
months of 2011 reflected only a very small fraction of night
raids in which civilians were killed, according to officials
of the independent Afghan commission that co-produced the
2010 report on civilian casualties with the U.N. mission.

The report on civilian casualties by the United Nations Assistance
Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) attributed 80 percent of the 1,462
civilian deaths it counted during the six-month period to the Taliban —
mostly from improvised explosive devices — and only 14 percent of
them to “pro-government forces.”

The report credited the U.S.-NATO military command with reducing
civilian casualties in night raids during the six-month period by 15
percent compared with the same period last year.

But officials of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights
Commission (AIHRC),
which collaborated with UNAMA on its 2010 civilian casualties report,
told IPS that the number of night raids that UNAMA investigated in
some fashion could only have been a very small proportion of the total
number of targeted raids with civilian casualties.

A leading official of the independent commission has also objected
publicly to UNAMA’s exclusion from the total in last year’s report of
most of the allegations of civilian deaths in raids that had been
brought to its attention.

The AIHRC officials, who have personal experience on the issue of
civilian casualties from night raids, told IPS that most night raids
are carried out in districts that are dominated by the Taliban. In
those districts, people are not able to file complaints and usually
are not even aware of any opportunity to do so, the sources said.

The AIHRC sources requested anonymity because they are not authorized
to talk to the news media about the matter.

Afghanistan

In Helmand province, the raids are believed to be concentrated in the
districts where the Taliban are strongest, such as Baghran, Baghni,
Sangin, and Nahr-e-Saraj, the sources explained. The same is true for
Kandahar, Zabul, Uruzgan, and other southern and eastern provinces
where the Taliban has a strong presence, the AIHRC sources said.

The commission received only nine complaints directly from families of
those who had been killed or injured in a night raid during the first
six months of 2011, according to the AIHRC sources.

In fact, the commission gets most of its information about civilian
casualties in night raids not from complaints from people in the area
where the raids take place but from talking with people in detention,
the sources said.

But that information is fragmentary, according to the sources, because
the commission has access to only a fraction of the detainees in the
Afghan prison system and because the detainees themselves are only
aware of some of the cases.

UNAMA has seven regional offices, but travel and contact between those
offices and the districts in which the Taliban are strongest are
limited.

Daphne Eviatar, who has monitored human rights in Afghanistan for the
U.S.-based group Human Rights First, agreed with the assessment that
the families of victims in many districts would be unlikely to file
complaints about civilian casualties from night raids.

In a February 2011 interview with researchers on a study by the Open
Society Foundations and The Liaison Office, an unnamed “international
human rights monitor” went even further. The unnamed individual
admitted to “underreporting of night raids because many of the areas
in which they took place are inaccessible and the civilians are
difficult to verify.”

UNAMA is the only international entity that has been reporting totals
of civilian casualties in night raids.

The UNAMA report for the first six months indicates that the NATO-led
International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) had refused repeatedly
to provide information on the number of night raids it had carried
out.

Nevertheless, figures provided by ISAF to The Washington Post and
to
blogger Bill Roggio show a total of 2,020 targeted raids in the
six-month period from early May through early November 2010, killing
roughly 2,000 “insurgents.”

U.S. military officers also told the researchers for the Open
Society Foundations study that shots had been fired in only 20
percent of night raids. That would mean that 2,000 people were killed
in just over 400 raids in which shots were fired during the six months — an average of five people per shooting incident.

The vast majority of night raids target a single individual. So the
available statistics on night raids suggest that the vast majority of
those killed in the raids had not been targeted.

UNAMA acknowledged in the report that ISAF does not apply the same
definition of “civilian” based on international humanitarian law that
UNAMA applies in counting civilian casualties.

U.S. Special Forces officers belonging to a unit that had killed nine
election workers along with a former Taliban insurgent they had
mistakenly believed was the Taliban shadow governor of Takhar province
in September 2010 told former BBC reporter Kate Clark last December
that anyone found in the company of a person who is targeted is
regarded as an insurgent as well.

The very broad definition of “insurgent” used by ISAF in releasing
figures on the number killed in night raids, along with statistics on
raids coming from ISAF itself, suggests that most of those killed in
night raids would be considered civilians under international
humanitarian law criteria.

UNAMA would not allow IPS to interview the head of its human rights
office, Georgette Gagnon, about the 2011 report, even though she had
told IPS she could do an interview during the week of Aug. 22.

In responses to questions e-mailed by IPS, however, Gagnon said that
UNAMA had investigated a total of 89 night raids in which casualties
had been alleged and that it had rejected the allegations of civilian
deaths in 58 of those cases.

AIHRC and UNAMA, which co-produced the 2010 report, had clashed over
UNAMA’s decision to put the number of civilian deaths in night raids
at 82 in that report.

Nader Nadery, a commissioner of the AIHRC, revealed in an interview
with IPS after the report was published that UNAMA had based the
figure of 82 deaths on only 13 night raids in which the civilian
deaths had been verified to UNAMA’s satisfaction. Nadery said the
total had excluded alleged civilian deaths in 60 other raids.

UNAMA did not partner with AIHRC in producing the 2011 six-month
report.

In a recent interview with IPS, Nadery estimated that 462 civilian
deaths had occurred in all of the night raids in 2010 about which the
commission had obtained some information.

The latest report’s methodological section confirms that alleged
civilian deaths are not included in UNAMA’s total if the civilian
status of any of the victims in an incident is uncertain.

Gagnon told IPS that said the mission’s decisions on such cases “are
based on firsthand accounts for the vast majority of the incidents
investigated.” She would not say, however, how many of the decisions
to reject allegations were made on the basis of eyewitness accounts.

Gagnon also acknowledged that ISAF and Afghan officials had challenged
some allegations, but she would not reveal how many of the allegations
that had been rejected fell into that category.